CD-ROM proved especially irresistible to game publishers, which had long been constrained by the skimpy capacity of floppy disks. Brøderbund‘s Myst, ...

Step back to the early CD-ROM era, though, and things were a little kookier. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drives hit the market that required the use of a bulky plastic caddy to load discs.

“By the early 1990s, there was a large end-user community using CD-ROM technology proving wide access to electronic resources,” he writes. During the boom of CD-ROM databases in libraries, Bobinski ...